Every other company has scads of books written about thier programs, why not Houdini? I would love to be able to go to Barnes and Noble and pick some up or better yet check them out from my local public library.

software specific cg books most always come from the software packages user base. i.e. a fanatic and expert in modeling within the maya enviroment might decide to write a book about his techniques using maya as his tool.

with houdini's user base being so small compared to say 3dsmax, xsi, or maya, it makes it somewhat difficult to get one out there. plus, i think that many who would be qualified to write a book about houdini would not have the time to produce and publish it. i would think that most people qualified to do so are swallowed up by the industry.

as a side note. there is a good amount of online material dealing with houdini to get you in the right direction. and IMHO, the best cg books out there are not software specific but deal with specific cg concepts and methods. with those, you can always apply them to your app of choice.

Well, if you're looking for an VFX book, “Creating 3D Effects for Film, TV, and Games” by David Santiago was mentioned on the mailing list. It's not a Houdini book per se but it has lots of descriptions of various Houdini operators.

another thing to realize about books is that an author/agaent needs to convince a publisher to publish the book…
Publisher: so you want me to publish a book on Houdini
Author: yep
Publisher: how many copies will it sell?
Author: well the world wide Houdini comunity is…er..about…um…a few thousand I guess…
Publisher: don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out…

the other alternative is for Side Effects to publish a book itself - this requires finding an author (difficult for deecue's reasons and more) and guiding a project through all the needed steps (thins requires a great deal of time and resources)…

All of what you have said is all well and good but it seems like Sidefx is deliberately trying to more and more hide the information that is out there or at least hinder one's access to it. I tried to download the PDF documentation from Sidney Vis Lab and it is only accessable locally. The PDF files are not in houdini 7 I had to download version 6 and extract the pdf files from that. Now when they get rid of version 6 then the pdf files will not be accessible to people who are new to Houdini. Also, I tried to find “Disc 2” on line and couldn't. It used to be there. As a matter of fact there used to be two download sites for Sidefx but now there is only SVL.
One more question on this. If a person were to purchace Houdini master would they recieve a users manual and if so, why can't someone just purchace it.

All of what you have said is all well and good but it seems like Sidefx is deliberately trying to more and more hide the information that is out there or at least hinder one's access to it.

i severely doubt that SESI would deliberately be trying to keep information from it's users. not having enough time to keep up on some things is another story, but there's no way they would be making an effort to stop you from learning the program.

The PDF files are not in houdini 7

the pdf files are all now built within the houdini 7 help system.. people have already mentioned it here before and even left there comments on having it that way.. i would suggest a forum search for more information..


as far as disc 2, or another download site, or the user manual i don't know about any of them, so i can't respond.. maybe someone else could chime in here…

The information may be in there but The PDF's themselves are not. There is absolutely no way to print the information and take it away from the computer. And what about “disc 2” That was all of the video tutorials all combined into one download. It was basically the tutorial pages combined into a downloadable file instead of a person having to click on four links at a time and wait for ever to get them all and running the risk of missing some support files or videos.

In H7 the priority was a new back-end and interface for the online help (in the embedded browser) and generating PDFs unfortunately fell into the “we can't do everything right now” pile (low-level: because we generate the docs from XML instead of FrameMaker, we need to set up XSL-FO to get PDFs where we used to get them “for free”). Hopefully searchable help made up for it somewhat.

In the next version, the docs focus is on creating basic content to get people up to speed quickly. Once again, PDFs are lower on the priority list. But I'm still hoping to do the back-end work necessary to generate PDFs (since it's the same work I need to do to get a certain cool WYSIWYG XML editor working). Once that's done, it would be fairly trivial to generate PDFs for the H7 docs as well.

Rob can deal with the question of missing training materials better than I (when he gets back from vacation . I can't really speak with any authority on that, sorry.

Also, I see SideFX is employing new people to do next generation of learning material. Should be nice to have a update to videos and docs that are availble already. I would like them to be task based like ones on 3dbuzz tho which were regretably never finished ( the twister tutorial). Maybe something in the lines of ‘How to make that A52 commercial for that car’ lol.

I wonder if SideFx is open for telework in area of learning material production? I have a apperentice project almost finished that could focus on parametric modeling as its a old 17th century ship that is parametricaly constructed so you can have 100s of different ships only by varying some parameters such as number of masts, cabine decks, front sail on/off etc.

Hey Guys,

Edward thanks for the mention of that book that is one that slipped by me. I will have to get it now. Are there anyother Effects books out there. I thinkI might go for that camera matching book too. There are several good lighting books. I wish there were learning videos for Renderman. A52 car commerical was made by extruding curves along the car. Smoke and mirrors. That ship you are talking about sounds really interesting. I have some ideas in the works for automating modeling in Houdini but I have not had the time to actually implement them yet. Too busy with other CG works. Your ship is right in line for Crowds. That is exactly the kind of digital asset you need to do crowds of characters, ships, cars, whatever. I am not going to ask anything more about training materials until siggraph. I figure if SideFx is going to release learning materials here in the near future then thats when they will release them. The modeling videos would have to have a good well thought out angle in which to describe modeling for production in Houdini. I mean modeling in Houdini is nothing like the other modeling apps. It is extremely powerful. You can make a model the tradional way or you can really use the power of Houdini to create new modeling tools, automodeling procedures in your networks, branching modeling networks that create duplicates of the same object yet funamentally different as they pass down the network. Use VOPs to model generate animatable modeling tools, and modeling for rigging and animation / Digital Assets. I could go on and on. Anyhow.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

I bought it for the way he explains the VFX pipeline and tells the reader how to create your own if you want to for your own works or own studio.. The examples in the book are all houdini files but i guess you can use them for other apps too. You can download examples from the book off the publishers website. MatrixNAN do they use Houdini in Atlanta?? U should get this book very good explaionations.. The only books i have found for FX iis the ASC treasury of Visual Effects book you can buy it online at the asc website.. It tells you how the older fx movies were done. As well as the ILM books Digital Domain book and the regular books they say to get.. But most are all either MAYA or Lightwave books or 3d max books. from what i have seen. I have seen and used partly Houdini since Prisms and Houdini is the only one that i have seen that gives you this much power with out writing a bunch of mel scripts or use plug ins like the rest.. I wish i would of stuck to Houdini from the begining I would of finished my thesis a while ago..

I hear they will teach it at the New scad school down there they are going to be adding it this fall . thinking about making the trip to learn it finally and sticking to it.

G

Hey Cylibral,

Can you provide the links to the books from DD and ILM. No I am the only Houdini artist that I know of in Atlanta. Also I am the only XSI artist in Atlanta too it seems. Lots and lots of Max people. Then there are the Maya people mostly thanks to Fathom studios. Then there is the Lightwave group which is smaller. Then there is me for the XSI, Houdini, ZBrush, etc, etc, etc. Shed a tear. Unless I can get something built up here in Atlanta I will probably leave GA once I finish my 2nd Degree at Georgia Tech in Artifical Intelligence. I am also considering the Master Track at SCAD for VFX. You have to go down to Sahavana though you can not do it from the Atlanta branch right now. Are you at NYU? I always kind of wanted to go there but did not have the money.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Well i;m currently at the School of Visual arts in NYC. There is no Houdini people in my school right now besides me and this other guy. There were some that has interned at SESi which i hope to do one day. BUt from what i know and remember there isn;t many houdini hguys left here in NY. There were One guy from Rhino but he;s at Sony now and my frineds i used to work with which are at DD and Sony. The only person who is a houdini avocator is one of my teachers who used to work at DD who told me to get back into it and that is more in demand then the MAYA people but i want to have a good grasp of both incase i can;t make it into a Houdin house. But I am in the process of developing my thesis and R and D process for it and houdini was my choice for the fx in it and maya for the charcter part. BUt you can go to Amazon.com for the Ilm books and DD book . Great stuff in them from how they did star wars through the digital in the ILm books. the DD book covers cool concepts in Cg and making of a bunch of cool movies they worked on . From Apollo 13 to Grinch if i can remember off the top of my head. I was asking about Atlanta because my brother has been tring to get me to move there since he went down.. Scad atlanta in the fall they said they will be offereing the VFX part of their degree and more in the spring… I have been in and out of school for not having much money so i know how it feels interning everywhere posible. I have learned various parts of Prisms when it was out i have the tapes and the books .. I also tried to get into houdini since beta but I somehow want to make it my prime package .. I;m wondering if the Rigid bodies Houini are solid so i can play with it and do some tests.. Industrial Light & Magic: Into the Digital Realm : http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345381521/qid=1116616904/sr=8-4/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i4_xgl14/102-2833799-9790552?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 [amazon.com]
Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345322630/ref=pd_bxgy_text_1/102-2833799-9790552?v=glance&s=books&n=507846&st= [amazon.com]*


Digital Domain: The Leading Edge Of Visual Effects
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0823079295/qid=1116617048/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-2833799-9790552?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 [amazon.com]
these are the linjks to those books..

http://www.theasc.com/magazine/april05/conundrum2/index.html [theasc.com]


http://www.theasc.com/cgibin/store/acsstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=10801 [theasc.com]


great books

if you like to i have a vast amount of online links for various stuff from fx to animation and everythng inbetween.. jjimenez11@nyc.rr.com



well
have a nice day

George